The 34-year-old Stewart was released by the Toronto Blue Jays Monday, a little more than four months after he bumped Reed Johnson out of the outfield and on to Chicago.

TORONTO — Shannon Stewart stopped mid-speech, searching for the right word to convey his emotions.

“Another way to end my Blue Jay . . . experience,” he said over the phone from Florida.

The 34-year-old Stewart was released by the Toronto Blue Jays Monday, a little more than four months after he bumped Reed Johnson out of the outfield and on to Chicago.

“In all honesty I don’t really understand why I was brought over here, the whole experience didn’t make much sense,” said Stewart, who hit .240 with a home run and 14 runs batted in in 52 games before a sprained ankle put him on Major League Baseball’s disabled list on June 8. “I felt I was more of an insurance policy from Day 1.

“I really wasn’t, quote-unquote, the guy when they decided to take me over Reed,” he added.

Stewart, a career .297 hitter, joined Toronto during spring training on a minor-league invitation to camp. The Jays saved about $1 million US_in salary when they chose Stewart over Johnson, and they hoped he would provided some consistent offence. But Stewart hit just .200 in April.

The release of designated hitter Frank Thomas in April might have led to more at-bats, but Toronto signed veteran outfielders Kevin Mench and Brad Wilkerson, and later called up Adam Lind.

“When Frank left, I thought I’d be able to play out there every day, it just didn’t happen to me,” said Stewart.”If I had to do it all over again, I would have never signed here.

“They told me Lind was going to play in front of me, all right, fine,” he added. “Then Mench and Wilkerson came over. It just didn’t seem right from the get-go.”

Ricciardi said Stewart’s poor start and a Toronto offence that entered Monday ranked 11th among the American League’s 14 teams gave the team little room for patience.

“It’s a different game when you can have three or four guys in your lineup hot and you can carry some guys that aren’t real hot, but one through nine we’ve really struggled all year,” he said. “When we started off the season, we thought Shannon would be the best guy for the job for us. It just didn’t work out.”

The Jays offered to keep Stewart in the minors, where he has been rehabbing his ankle. Ricciardi said it was a genuine move to honour a player who ranks in the franchise’s top 10 in runs, hits, doubles and steals.

“I think most guys would have taken the release in that situation,” Stewart said. “I might get picked up by somebody else. I’m healthy now.”

Stewart, who spent more than a decade in the Jays’ organization after being drafted in 1992, suggested he had become a forgotten man at the end of his second tour.

“Out of sight, out of mind, that’s how I felt my whole rehab,” he said. “It’s too bad. I play here all these years. To leave like this, that’s the way it goes. The way it goes in sports. It’s business.”

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